It does no work because it purportedly does all work

I don’t think that every effort has been made to look for evidence and none has turned up…You and Richard think it’s an empirical matter whether there are deities (or fairies? goblins? consider why you think the latter are zoological non-starters) and I think it’s a matter of coherence of the concept…

And, I find, so do I. The more I think about it the more I think that.

The point is that ‘god’ is not like ‘ether’ – it is not amenable to empirical investigation, and does not occupy a slot in some systematic framework of thinking about the world that might be improved on in the light of better theory or observation. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; like a contradiction it entails anything whatever; it is consistent with all evidence and none.

Exactly! By which I mean, that’s what I would have said if only I’d thought of it. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; that’s beautiful, and exact.

But ‘god’ is not like ‘yeti’ (which might – so to say: yet? – be found romping about the Himalayas), it is like ‘square circle’. Trying to explain to someone who thinks that ‘god’ is like ‘yeti’ (namely, you) let alone to someone who thinks ‘god’ is like ‘Barack Obama’ (names an actual being, as Christians and Muslims do) that it is actually not like ‘yeti’ but like ‘square circle’ and that nothing can count as evidence for square circles, is harder work for ‘god’ than ‘square circle’ only because religious folk have been squaring the circle for so long!

Furthermore, “god” is like square circles and round triangles and octagonalhexagons and flat cubes and married bachelors. There are different versions of god, to say the least, and there is no univerally agreed set of minimal items that belong on the god-list, so there is no core “god” concept that we can try to match to possible evidence.

It’s dead easy to imagine evidence of a yeti. That wouldn’t even surprise me much, because the Himalayas are difficult terrain, and some animals are very good at hiding, and there is more than one species of great ape.

It’s also easy to imagine evidence of a species that would be superior to humans. That’s child’s play. But “god” is a whole different territory, with built-in hand-wavy stuff that make it as Anthony says consistent with all evidence and none. It’s Intelligently Designed that way.

I certainly agree with you and Grayling, but the real problem is explaining all of this in constructive ways in the real world—especially since (1) as Grayling puts it, “religious folk have been squaring the circle for so long,” and (2) I think there’s strong reason to believe that a large proportion of monotheists, at least when backed into a corner, would only admit to believing in a very-powerful, very-knowledgable superperson they call “God” rather than a full-blown omni-thing.

Maybe that would make for a more fruitful conversation? Taking it as given that “God” is only a very-powerful, very-knowledgable (i.e., much more so than human beings) superperson, what evidence would you accept as sufficient to demonstrate the existence of that?

Hmm. The more I read all this, the more it feels like feeding the troll.

I’m happy to see atheists flexing their collective brains and double checking their assumptions from time to time, but too much attention on this topic, and it almost gives legitimacy without meaning to.

I dunno. It’s just a gut feeling right now, and out of all this, so far, the idea that God is an incoherent idea from the get go, articulated so well by you, Ophelia, and AC, and PZ put it in his own way, has made it worth it for me on some level, but I tempted to paraphrase Eric mac and say “enough of this nonsense!

Between Dawkins and Grayling I’m closer to Grayling, yet something in me resists going all the way. I don’t think there’s any chance a god is real, anymore than I think fairies are possibly real. But not all gods are incoherent. A god could be strong but not omnipotent, vastly intelligent but not omniscient. So I’ll maintain a kind of dual view which discounts impossible conceptions like Grayling and maintains extreme scepticism about the prospects for a naturalized god.

It’s true that believers probably wouldn’t accept a natural god as a god, but I’ll go with Arthur C. Clarke and treat a godlike advanced being as a good fit. Now, what are the chances for that? That will be an empirical question, so we’re back to Dawkins and extreme improbability. It all depends on how deviant you allow a god conception to be. But it’s certainly true that in the cases of the gods of popular belief Grayling is right.

I agree with Rieux. My requests for evidence results in: just look at the trees, someone must have created the universe, or my favorite – there is no evidence, that’s why you have to have faith. Their god won’t show himself or perform miracles because “he won’t do tricks to please an atheist.” Right.

I think Rieux has a good suggestion there. It’s clear that the Bible does not portray Yahweh or Jesus as omniscient. Furthermore, it probably doesn’t take omniscience to create a universe and fine-tune it for life. Trial and error would suffice. The omni-everything God seems to have been created by philosophers with too much time on their hands, and religion could well do without him.

I disagree that the god hypothesis is fundamentally different than the concept of the “ether.” Granted, not all claims about god are equally testable, but the point is, if such a being existed, there should be ways to confirm it. If god is supposed to interact with the natural world, that should leave some evidence. No evidence, no support for the claim. But by discounting the need for evidence, we lose the ability to cite the galling lack of it, and thus unwittingly undermine the case for atheism.

Also, the fact that apologists can dream up a seemingly infinite number of ad hoc excuses to avoid accepting the failures of the god hypothesis is not a reason to discard the need for evidence, since any failed hypothesis can be kept on life support in this manner. Carl Sagan’s wonderful essay about the invisible, heatless dragon living in his neighbor’s garage details the process. But the subject could have been anything: homeopathy, ghosts, aliens, creationism, a young Earth, angels, demons, gods… The list of nonsense that true-believers will never give up is endless. So I see no reason to privilege the god hypothesis in any way. It’s merits are wholly dependent on the evidence available to support it.

But I stand by my comment in Monday’s thread: this whole dust-up is just about the nonsensicality and emptiness of the term “God.” We’ve got billions of believers who have seriously disparate notions of what a “god” is, not to mention plenty of reason to think that what many theists say they believe and what they actually operationally believe are very different. (The latter is partly what Greta Christina called the “when anyone is watching” problem. It’s also partly about the fact that huge numbers of theists haven’t actually thought carefully about any of this.)

And so we atheists are reduced to running around, trying to catch a cloud with a net. Meh.

I think Rieux hits the nail on the head there – it is all about communicating these ideas to theists, seeing as they are the ones who see this not as a thought exercise but as something that really needs to be answered affirmatively.

I think the place to start is to show them the sneaky little tricks that have evolved around the question, let them start doing some serious thinking without any of the leaps of faith & non sequiturs they routinely allow themselves.

I hope that the moral and political importance of the impossibility of evidence for god, as expressed so well by Grayling, is realised and is promoted vigorously:

Because what is written in your holy books and said by your preachers is beyond proof, then any attempts to insist that you have any greater access to moral truths because of your religion will be utterly rejected.

Taking the possibility of evidence for God, or the reasonableness of being less that 7 on Dawkins’ belief scale, out of the debate on the role of religion is, I think, an important step forward to secularism.

Also, the fact that apologists can dream up a seemingly infinite number of ad hoc excuses to avoid accepting the failures of the god hypothesis is not a reason to discard the need for evidence

The point of all this is to make it clear that there is no “god hypothesis”. Talking about evidence is conceding that the concept of god has advanced to the stage where it could be called a hypothesis. As far as I am concerned, it hasn’t. God isn’t a failed hypothesis, it wasn’t even an hypothesis. We were putting our trust in the ability of religions to come up with something that could be tested. For a long time we have taken their word that they had, but that was never true.

When the ancients talked about the aether they were referring to a vague mystical thing that met some purpose. When physicists talk about aether they meant something that produced specific terms in equations that did something that bore some similarity to the original notion of ether. The latter has been falsified the former has arguable not (because in it’s form it is unfalsifiable).

I think of god concepts in a similar way. It can be vague and unfalsifiable but that doesn’t mean you can’t form adapt it into something that is.

I am perplexed about AC’s remarks about fairies. Is he saying that if biologists could catch fairies and prod them with probes and study them that he wouldn’t believe they existed? Or is he referring to fairies that are by definition uncatchable?

Okay people, time to check your bibles (source of all Truth) once again – it worked for six whole days, during which time it created everything, either six thousand or five billion years ago (one of these numbers is correct AFAIK) and has since been retired for something over six thousand or five billion years. If it needed to do more I’m sure it would. It can’t be expected to concern itself with every upstart like YWHW, AlLah, Zeus, Glooskap, Quetzelcoatl or Rama who steps into the power vacuum created because of its retirement.

Being retired myself I know how six whole days of work can really take it out of you. Hope I get to be retired for five billion years – although I’d settle for six thousand.

<blockquote>No, we don’t, because the burden of proof is on the people who claim there is a god, not the ones who don’t. That’s also why we’re not actually obliged to say what we would accept as evidence.</blockquote>I agree! Which is why I think saying no amount of evidence could convince us is the wrong message to send. Evidence could convince us. When people ask “What evidence would you accept?” the proper response is “What have you got?” If they don’t have anything and cannot suitably justify their beliefs, then the god hypothesis is dead in the water. Whether the believer’s inability to produce evidence is because it is nonexistent or because the concept of god is insufficiently coherent to yield any should be entirely irrelevant to us. We must always stress that this is a matter of evidence, evidence, evidence.

It’s good to see atheists charging against the hardest possible target: the very abstract idea of God.

Most concrete instantiations of this idea are ridiculous. Think for example about the Supermanesque God most americans believe in. Like, a bearded man that talks to them with audible words and that created the world as it is today a few thousand years ago. It’s so easy to take that God down that it’s not even entertaining.

Which is why I think saying no amount of evidence could convince us is the wrong message to send.

Mmmmyeah, that’s not exactly what I’m saying though. (I realize it looks pretty much the same!) I’m saying I have no idea what evidence for “God” would be evidence for, so I can’t say how much or what kind would convince me. I’m also saying I really don’t see how omni-properties could produce evidence that humans could process.

If it turned out that by “God” was meant something like Athena, then I could think of potential evidence. The does-everything god, not so much.

If we don’t believe that evidence could convince us, then why should we send a message that it could?

Because despite the number of atheists who proclaim that evidence cannot sway them, I have yet to find one that does not indeed rely upon evidence when arguing against the god hypothesis. What we know about the formation of ancient religious texts, the history of our planet, the evolution of homo sapiens, the workings of biology and the mammalian brain, human psychology…all these areas produce fertile evidence which undermine the god hypothesis. Evidence is just what we know about reality. To throw out evidence means you intend to argue against the god hypothesis on nothing but pure logic alone and to prove philosophically that it is untrue a priori without ever making a single reference to reality. This quite simply cannot be done or it would have been accomplished long ago.

What many atheists seem to mean is that they cannot conceive of any amount of evidence which would constitute absolutely-convincing, iron-clad proof for the existence of god. Well, neither can I. But as anyone familiar with the scientific method should know, there is no such thing as absolute certainty. We are always forced to reach conditional conclusions. And the only way to do that is to consider all the evidence and make a determination.

To throw out evidence means you intend to argue against the god hypothesis on nothing but pure logic alone and to prove philosophically that it is untrue a priori without ever making a single reference to reality. This quite simply cannot be done or it would have been accomplished long ago.

It could not be done long ago because the definitions of God and the supernatural were not the same then: supernaturalism and naturalism were indistinguishable. Definitions have changed.

The question here isn’t whether or not god exists, but whether or not descriptions of god are coherent enough to form an hypothesis, and also whether or not aspects of god described by doctrine can be tested by evidence. Those questions certainly can be dealt with without evidence, or so I claim.

Because despite the number of atheists who proclaim that evidence cannot sway them, I have yet to find one that does not indeed rely upon evidence when arguing against the god hypothesis.

We can reply on evidence to dismiss certain possibilities (such as the need for a designer). Whether or not those are aspects of God is a different question.

Steve Zara, you are correct that we can only evaluate coherent ideas, but that is not a special trait of god’s “unknowability,” as many theists would have us believe. God could be tested if believers got their shit straight and came up with something of substance. They are the ones dropping the ball, and I think that’s what needs to be pointed out over and over. I think admitting that we cannot be swayed by evidence sounds too much like letting them off the hook.

God could be tested if believers got their shit straight and came up with something of substance. They are the ones dropping the ball, and I think that’s what needs to be pointed out over and over.

If believers come up with a definition of god that could be tested it would have to be one without all this supernatural stuff, including God being a source of morality. I would have no problem with that, and I suspect many people would share my view.

I think admitting that we cannot be swayed by evidence sounds too much like letting them off the hook.

The argument is not that we cannot be swayed by evidence. It is that no evidence is possible because of how they define God. That is a very different statement. It putting them on a bigger hook.

Most atheists say rhetorically “Where is the evidence for God?” but are not really interested in looking for evidence for God, they’re trying to point out that God has no corresponding meaning to a reality, only to concepts and abstractions and stories. It’s always a rhetorical question, and the theist never gets the point. So perhaps it would be good to move beyond it, and beyond naive empiricism, and begin to throw out all claim that are logically impossible or refuted, without constantly having that sense that some new piece of evidence could come along that would make them less impossible.

The argument is not that we cannot be swayed by evidence. It is that no evidence is possible because of how they define God.

Well, then I agree. It’s that distinction which needs to be stressed. It’s not that gods are in some special category that defy critical examination, it’s that any bad idea can be made sufficiently vague to avoid testability. People just go to greater lengths to protect the failed god hypothesis than they did to save concept of aether. But the same standards of evidence apply to both.

Forgive me, but I’ll be grateful when y’all get past this. Here we have what we all recognize as fictional human constructs, and people are discussing what would convince them that the myths we know were fabricated by our ancestors are true. I mean, C’mon.

As the only ideas about “god” with which I am familiar make no coherent sense I can only regard the question of what I would accept as evidence for the existence of such an entity as meaningless.

Perhaps one day something will turn up which can only be explained as the work of something for which “god” is the only available epithet, but in that moment it would define what is meant by “god” for everyone. So I shall view any such development with the same interest as everyone else on the planet. But till then, I won’t be holding my breath or wasting time over pointless questions.

On the other hand, I think it’s a brilliant idea to show the pointlessness of the question, as Grayling does. As Steve says, “God isn’t a failed hypothesis, it wasn’t even an hypothesis.” It’s too incoherent even to be wrong.

. It’s not that gods are in some special category that defy critical examination,

I believe that modern ideas of gods are in that kind of category. The ideas have evolved to cope with centuries of science. As a result, god has acquired impossible-to-verify attributes like being beyond time and space, and having infinite properties.

Forgive me, but I’ll be grateful when y’all get past this. Here we have what we all recognize as fictional human constructs, and people are discussing what would convince them that the myths weknow were fabricated by our ancestors are true. I mean, C’mon.

One of the reasons I wanted to start this debate is because I agree with you. The problem I see is that by mistakenly treating the idea of god as testable and being all open-minded about it, we aren’t insisting that others recognize God’s fictional nature.

No; I mean what I’ve been saying, and I don’t think it’s unclear. I think “God” is a jumble and full of contradictions, so I don’t know what evidence for it would even be.

Yes, I know. I only disagree with the your statement that “‘god’ is a whole different territory.” It isn’t. It’s the same territory we’re all familiar with. Any hypothesis can be made incoherent. It’s trivially easy to keep making excuses until something becomes utterly untestable. Again, I point to Sagan’s invisible dragon. So I disagree with Grayling. God is exactly like “ether” in that both are failed hypotheses. The are not qualitatively different from one another. And if the same effort was made to salvage the concept of ether from disproof as believers have made for god, we’d have something not much different than the jumbled mess we now call theology.

While I try to avoid “tone trolling”, I think this is one time when tone is critically important. If you say something like “no amount of evidence could make me accept the existence of a god,” then even if you can back it up with impeccable argumentation, you’re going to go down in flames in any public argument.

I think the solution to this has been touched on by Steve Zara and others. Start by saying “Define *exactly* what you mean by god(s) and how these god(s) affect the world.” From that point on you can either (i) point out the vacuity of any untestable definition, (ii) present the evidence against any testable definition, and (iii) object when they inevitably sneak in a new definition.

This allows one to rebut any of the usual rubbish arguments while still maintaining the possibility of changing one’s mind if someone could provide a reasonable definition of god and solid evidence for it. Obviously I don’t think that is ever going to happen, but the possibility should be entertained.

I think you are exactly right about the problem with the way this matter is expressed. It should not be personalised: it should not be about a personal attitude towards evidence (as in “I would not have my mind changed by any evidence”), it should be about the nature of evidence in general and what kinds of things can be investigated using evidence, and what can’t.

I can’t see a rejection of the possibility of evidence changing many believer’s minds, but I would hope that it might have some philosophical and political impact, by shifting the consensus of how religion is treated more towards hard atheism, and less towards forms of NOMA. I see debates on whether or not God exists as to some extent helping NOMA, by giving intellectual respectability to theism. Not that I don’t enjoy many of those debates and find the contributions interesting, but I’m seeing less and less of a point to them. Time to launch a harder atheist attack, I feel.

I once joked that Yahweh could prove himself to me by having one of his chosen people (a preacher, say) tell me which playing card I was thinking of in my head. And I was going to think of a really unlikely card too, not something obvious like the 10 of diamonds or the ace of spades. But since David Blaine already does that trick, I joked, I would just go ahead and worship him in the meantime. Yeah that’s it—guess which card I’m thinking of, and I’ll become a theist.

Oh go ahead and laugh. It’s still more reasonable than a damn frozen waterfall.

“… like a contradiction it entails anything whatever; it is consistent with all evidence and none…

…it is like ‘square circle…’

God, as a supernatural being, should not be constrained by the laws of the universe and should easily be able to transcend the poor logical conundrums of mere mortals. That’s fine and Jim Dandy.

But this approach is also Grayling’s downfall, for he uses it not to justify a god properly worthy of adoration,but instead uses it to prop up the tin pan Abrahamic gods. For surely a god who can make a square circle can devise a world without children dying in agony from cancer?

A god worth worshiping is a god who doesn’t let his children go hungry, or die in tsunamis, or kill each other out of religious misunderstanding. A proper god answers all prayers, is not shy or invisible, doesn’t leave incoherent instructions, doesn’t demand adoration, doesn’t enforce obedience through fear. A proper god looks nothing like Jesus Christ, YAHWEH, or Allah.

There has never been a satisfying theodicy, and Grayling’s gambit here seems to me to be making a cracking case for atheism, not for Christ.

Grayling wants to show how Russell’s distinction between atheism and agnosticism is paper-thin. Grayling’s claim is that Russell tacitly bases the distinction between atheism and agnosticism on “a quibble about proof”, meaning that (following Hume) you can’t disprove the existence of a thing in the same way that you can disprove 2+2=6. If Russell’s worry were to be shown to be unsound, then his form of agnosticism would be indistinguishable from atheism.

And sure enough, Grayling challenges Russell’s epistemology, claiming that Russell tacitly assimilates inferences on the basis of science into inferences on the basis of demonstration. By this turn of phrase, I guess Grayling means to say that Russell thinks that demonstrative proof is a kind of positive gold standard, which everyone compares any old epistemic claim to. On the other hand, Grayling seems to think that proof is defined negatively for all kinds of discourse: as “in adducing evidence of the kind and in the quantity that makes it irrational, absurd, irresponsible or even a mark of insanity to reject the conclusion thus being supported.” He says that a belief that is scientifically invalid (e.g., next time I go out in the rain I won’t get wet) is just as irrational as a belief that is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to demonstrate (e.g., rain does not wet anything). Hence there’s no difference in proof. Hence the poverty of agnosticism.

For many of us, when Grayling argues that “if you seriously mean that you think it might be conceivable or possible that there could be evidence for a deity, [then you are] agnostic, not atheist”, he provides an implausible formulation of what it means to be “agnostic”. I’ll suggest that this is because Grayling gives an implausible formulation of what it means to give proof, and this implausibility is reflected in his example.

“Suppose someone thinks: ‘My belief that rain will wet me if I do not use an umbrella is (only?) inductively justified; therefore I am entitled to believe that it is possible that rain might not wet me next time I do not use an umbrella when it rains.’ Is the belief that ‘rain might not wet me next time’ less irrational or absurd than the belief that rain does not wet at all? Obviously not.” (I assume by “entitled” he means “partially entitled”, meaning something like “within the margin of error that is associated with this form of inductive inference”.)

Evidently, the belief that “It is possible that rain might not wet me” is “obviously” just as irrational as the belief that “rain does not wet”. But it don’t see how obvious this is. To be sure, insofar as we think that the two claims provide rational support for one another, then they are obviously equally irrational. But insofar as we treat them as distinct beliefs that are capable of being supported independently, there’s nothing obvious about the claim that they’re equally irrational. I might have good reason to think I will not be wet next time it rains because a canvas will be put up on the promenade, and no good reason to think that the rain itself will stop being wet.

That’s just to say that when the reasons are tied together, they sink together. Cut the rope and one reason might survive while the other drowns.

There’s a lot more to say about all this but I know Oph is going to start trimming if I go on. To cut to the chase: I think the “principle of bullshit” is true about religious claims provided by religious persons who lack intellectual integrity, but I don’t think it is true for claims made by people who do have integrity. Such persons, assuming there are any, make claims that we can inevitably prove wrong (or right), because in explicating our propositions we tend to make reference to facts of our experience.

#2. He Who Is Bloodthirsty, must be placated, and whose directives must be followed and

#3. The loving father of us all.

Either #1 or #2 came first in time. #1 is the subject of ongoing atheist-theist debate, and of this entire thread, but it is #3 who is of greatest interest to me. That third god is a great creature of the human imagination, which has until recently enabled people who are only very distantly related to address one another as ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, as in the tradition of mediaeval monasticism.

There was a morality of communal sharing of valuables in Christianity, and the teaching not only of the Christians but also of the Buddhists (from whom it may have passed to the Christians). In other traditions it was and is held that greed and obsessive individual wealth accumulation are inimical to the idea of the one big family of God’s children.

That idea has since been dropped by organised religion, but is by no means dead, and in a way is kept alive by modern neo-Darwinism, which reveals continually the close relatedness of all humans, and ultimately of all life.

The rest may have been corrupted, but the third view is the most persistent, and is behind the worthy ends charity and altruism, well seen in the recent Japanese earthquake-tsunami-nuclear emergency.

[...] to prove a concept which relies of subjective opinions and constantly shifting goalposts, while Ophelia Benson finds the whole idea of a deity as so often presented to us incoherent at best. Basically, everybody has their own ideas of what a deity is like, what it does, how it interacts [...]

1) Define ‘God’. What does the speaker mean by that word, specifically. What are the characteristics of ‘God.’

If the believer can’t say what it is, they have no idea what they believe in. This is the stumbling block, I think, for most theists. They have adopted a religion based on culture, have never thought about it, and assume that everyone is talking about the same thing when they say ‘god’, even though they themselves are unclear what they mean by it. The proliferation of religious sects is clear evidence that people do not have the same definitions even for the same purported gods.

2) How is this definition determined? How are these characteristics derived?

From where did the knowledge come that allowed the believer to fix their definition of ‘god’? Christians will often refer to the Bible, but will seldom be able to pinpoint exactly where in it, nor explain why the Bible is authoritative on the matter, other than the circular logic that the Bible says it is. Others will cite their own individual anecdotal experiences or perception, but these tend to fall into the two categories of ‘confirmation of already held beliefs’ and ‘experiences that do not support the defintions above,’ Nor do they offer any form of external evidence, being indistinguishable from delusion. Mostly, the answer to this is ‘somebody told me so’, even if the somebody is ‘themselves’.

3) Based on this definition, is the concept falsifiable, logically coherent, and testable?

Many gods, though not usually the gods of theologians, meet one or more of these. As soon as they do, they can be disproven. And are. Gods that have an effect on the physical world can be disproven by evidence. At this point, the believer falls back upon redefining to remove the god from one oand eventually all of these. See: Theologians. That is why step 1 is required first.

4) Finally, does this defintion encompass any god as actually worshipped by any believers in the named deity?

The resulting gods, to have any meaning, must match one or more of the existing belief systems, otherwise they are an admission that all of those belief systems are wrong. Chances are, the god that emerges from point 3 is useless and unknowable to a worshipper.

People don’t know what they believe in; they don’t even really care. They’re just conditioned to believe in something and adopt a provisional god that exactly reflects whatever they happen to think; whether that is their own or some authority figure’s opinion.

This is just an attempt at bringing coherence to the argument. Please fel free to tear it apart.

Besides the obvious issue of defining what is meant by the word “god”, one also has to acknowledge that the word “evidence” has been bandied about rather loosely.

What is evidence? It’s not a one-off demonstration of omni-anything or omni-everything. That’s an anecdote.

In order to count as evidence, one has to go through at least some of the following process.

1. Make a prediction that follows from the premise, and propose a null hypothesis that would invalidate the premise.

2. Describe in detail how the predicted outcome would be measured, to the satisfaction of an outside observer.

3. Set up test conditions so that one can state for certain that the predicted outcome indeed happened and was not the result of either random chance and/or any other alternative solution (why god when aliens will do).

4. Submit the results of the tests to interested but unbiased outside observers.

5. Have those results verified through repeat observations by either disinterested and/or hostile critics.

Predictability, measurability, verifiability, falsifiability, repeatability. Those are the hallmarks of evidence. And it’s especially important for the results to be verifiable and repeatable by outsiders. Otherwise, people will be getting lots and lots of research grants for cold fusion reactors.

(Sigh) Exactly. What’s “grace”? Does it come in tins? is it some sort of radiation? What, actually, are we talking about? How are we supposed to stipulate evidence when we don’t know what we are looking for? Religious people are always saying that this or that phenomenon is evidence of God. Well, they can say whatever they like. It’s just them saying things. Until they can demonstrate that their idea of God makes any kind of coherent sense they can hardly expect us to say what evidence we would accept.

The problem is that belief is woolly. One can believe something quite firmly until one examines it and finds that it doesn’t hold together. But some people go on believing it anyway, because they want to. All sorts of vague and unexamined assumptions and abstractions that have no relationship to anything in the world outside their heads. Fair enough, but why should clearer-eyed people have to try to prove their beliefs for them? It’s outrageous. Religious people won’t accept that their beliefs are woolly. They believe their beliefs are clear and sharp and the evidence is all around them. The conflict is not over evidence but between states of mind.

Maybe this is at root a definitional argument? From what I gather, Coyne and Grayling have been having a discussion about whether God is a testable hypothesis and/or a rational question worth undertaking in their respective fields (science and philosophy). Could we see this, then, as an “and/both” matter as oppposed to an “either/or” question? If the god concept at issue is defined as “yeti,” we can ask for empirical evidence and if it’s a “square circle,” we can actually dismiss it as an invalid hypothesis or question to begin with–in both philiosophy and science, no? Is it vital that we settle this question as though what’s at stake is how we define non-belief itself? I don’t think so.

I’m not advocating that super beings that are real be called gods, even if they are godlike in some ways by Clarke-ian standards. Perhaps Dawkins and those who agree with him are being hyper-indulgent of the extremely implausible, and perhaps this really does impress some believers that some atheists, even famous ones, think that god propositions aren’t totally batty. I can see the point of discouraging this view. Maybe we’re trying too hard to appear open-minded. This is a little bit strange considering that NA’s are portrayed as “dogmatic” and “fundamentalist”.

It occurs to me that the whole effort of religion is doomed. If the word God can mean anything, then it means nothing–the whole thing literally becomes meaningless. But if you do define God, then you run into some very nasty theological problems; you commit idolatry by creating some image of God. The three Abrahamic monotheisms are a web self-defeating contradictions like this.

If you want a real god it will be a natural one, because the flexible system of categories we use treats everything that we find the same way. If a god walks up and buttonholes you that as natural as anything else that works in the world. If we have to change the rules to allow for it, we’ll do that. The theists god is either nonexistent and super, or existent and nature. We can’t have it any other way that I can see, given the plasticity of naturalism. Hmmm, that would support Grayling….all real gods aren’t gods.

You have to have a view to encompass any case that might arise (empirical) while ruling out the class of impossibles. I see the problem as having very good reasons for abandoning the god concept while having not so solid reasons to preempt forever the bare possibility of taking it up again some day. Why would that happen? The best I can come up with is the super intelligent space creature, one that doesn’t much resemble humans or even Keanu Reeves. The alternative might be galaxies as living computers. They would be very slow, one imagines, too slow by several orders of magnitude for humans to figure out what they’re up to.